It’s a little know fact that when French aristo Baron Pierre de Coubertin averred that ‘the important thing is not to win but to take part,’ people thought he was talking about la guerre, and trying to post-rationalise France’s dismal performance in every cross-border conflict since the Norman Conquest. When they realised he was talking about sport, and specifically the multinational quadrennial sporting jamboree he’d just founded, even his compatriots began to suspect he’d been at the absinthe.